Like rjw, i got sick of all this CMC heated debate between few pplz in here...so i went out and looked into few sites... one site i came across a site that did a independent test on few brand name cdrs...suprisingly cdrs from IMATION (made by CMC) did the best in almost all tests. To check out the test click below:

Actually the reviews on that page're no good at all. It's completely out of date. The burners they use're only up to 16x, but they only test up to 12x while all the burners nowadays're up to 48x. Plus, the media they use now're out of date too, you can't really find any of the ones that they tested anymore. Also, they simply say that they tested BLER and so forth, and never really documented how they performed their test making the results questionable. No mention of what software or what hardware was used whatsoever. Plus the page doesn't even seem to completely load.

I did a little checking on an old OLD CD-R of mine, a BASF CMC CD-R I burned it at 4x in '96 (I think early to mid year). It's my backup copy of Office 2000, and I was just looking to see if perhaps it was time to make a new backup (I was also re-installing). To my surprise, the Disc had 0% errors on it when I ran scan disc. Also there was no spinning down for careful reading during the process. The burn was only about 50min long (out of 74min), but I have to say I was totally amazed! The ATIP is 97m 26s 60f Which surprised me too, because I normally find the 60f CMC discs to be rather, shall we say: not so good. Well, Long story short, the CD-R is 6 years old (roughly) and still going and it's still in very good condition!

however, I SHOULD mention, this is not normal for these CD-Rs, in any way! when I bought a box of 10 of these BASF CD-Rs (Made by CMC), 1 of them ALWAYS failed during the burning process! But I still think it's interesting!